It is quite certain that Yair Golan did not intend to rebirth himself as a local hero, a regional Rambo or a freedom fighter who becomes a one-man rescue squad in the south. It is quite clear that after already being categorized as a full-fledged leftist, a distinct Meretz man, a prominent protest activist, the one who called from the protest stage for a "civil uprising by illegal means" - Golan was already a foot and a quarter outside the Israeli mainstream. A kind of red sheet as far as the right-wing camp is concerned.
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But then came the Black Sabbath in Israel's history. When the first alarms sounded in most of the country's settlements, Golan was still turning over on the other side of his bed. "There were no alarms in sight," he smiles, doubtlessly apologizing. "So I slept. But at seven in the morning one of my sons woke me up on the phone: Did you hear? Did you hear?"
Golan, 61, Major General, former Deputy Chief of Staff, Commander of the Home Front Command and former Northern Command, a celebrated fighter who was already well on his way to the Chief of Staff, became famous mainly when he eliminated his chances with that famous speech from 2016 in which he said that "if there Something that scares me about the memory of the Holocaust is the identification of disturbing processes that took place in Europe at the time... and finding evidence of them here, among us today."
Golan has always been an expressive guy. direct. Does not hide positions, does not beautify, does not mince words, not enough of a politician. But last Saturday morning, Golan was as far from politics as possible; He got up from his bed, opened the news, "I am an experienced man and I understood that this is a national disaster on a scale we have never experienced."
From here, Golan became a soldier on his own accord. He took his champion's uniform out of the closet, "I found in the warehouse the shoes of my older son who was in Maglan, so they are also the same color (red - Rash), and I left."
4 Viewing the gallery
''I found the horror of God there. A real massacre''. People escape from nature's party
( Photo: from social networks )
He took his tiny, messy Toyota Yaris and hit the roads. "I said: If I come to the General Headquarters, I will be just another general who harasses them. If I come to the headquarters of the Home Front Command, they know me quite well, because after all I was there for three and a half years. When I arrived, I realized that the situation was ten times worse than I thought, And I said to Rafi Milo, the commanding general, listen, I'm ready to do any task. I'll go down to the field - there is an advantage to the fact that you walk around with the rank of general in the IDF, no one tells you 'don't go in', 'you can't be here' - all What I need is a weapon, a cartridge, and that's it. Of course, the afsnai here was much more generous - he gave me a weapon, a cartridge, a helmet and a vest, and I went down to Orim first. I got there after the battle, the commander of the district there was wounded in the shoulder, all the soldiers who were there fought exceptionally - and it's unbelievable, these are the soldiers of the headquarters, and they actually overcame and eliminated that battle, killed all the terrorists. Of course there were also quite a few dead. mostly the dead. And the amounts of the terrorists' equipment that were there are crazy."
A WhatsApp message he received in those moments from his sister turned him, without planning, into the unexpected savior of the missing and besieged from the nature party, who hid for hours in the fields without food or water, without anyone being able to reach them. "My sister writes to me: listen, I have a friend who says there are three people in the field, and this is their location, in the heart of the fields. And I look and see that it is relatively close, about 15 km from Maori. I know these fields, most of them can also be entered with a private car, and I drive there, suddenly see a thicket of such fools, go inside and find there three guys who ran away from the party, sitting and scared to death to come out of the bushes lest someone shoot them. I told them: It's me, Yair Golan, get out, get out. I took them out and drove them to the Negev junction - and there one of the fathers was waiting for them. As I download them, I get a call from Nir Guntz."
The story of the journalist Nir Guntz echoed in those hours on social networks, after Guntz's son, who was at the party, remained trapped in the field. "There is no army and no police, I'm begging someone from the security forces: give me a weapon, he's surrounded by terrorists, let me take him out alone," the worried and helpless father wrote online. In the end, he also reached Golan by phone, who asked him for the approximate location of the child and promised: "I'm going to bring him to you."
"I tell him: 'Listen, you come out of the trees, there is a wide dirt path, you just run on the path to the south. Do you see the sun?' He tells me 'yes'. 'You're running towards the sun. You can't go wrong!' They came out, they ran, they joined me, I took them out. And as I was dropping them off, another phone call: 'My son is thrown in some hole'. I tell him: send a location."
"He sent me shit of a location - a screenshot like this," Golan says. "I said OK, let's go. I arrive at Hatish, see that it is north of the settlement, somewhere in the fields. I enter the area, start driving on paths in the orchard, and I said: It is impossible to navigate like that. I try to call his son, suddenly he actually answers me. I ask : 'Where you?' And he can't send me a location either. But I can understand, from his descriptions, exactly where he is. It's about 500 meters away - and there's an iron gate there that you can't pass, and he and another guy with whom they're terribly afraid to go out. I tell him: 'Listen , you come out of the trees, there's a wide dirt path, you just run south on the path. Do you see the sun?' He tells me 'yes'. 'You're running towards the sun. You can't go wrong!' They came out, ran, joined me, I took them out. And as I was dropping them off, another phone call: 'My son is thrown in some hole'. I tell him: send a location."
And while Golan rescues lost and scared-to-death children who somehow managed to escape the massacre at the party and hide nearby, he sees the killing ravine itself: "What I found there was the horror of God. A real massacre. One force of terrorists attacked the party directly, and in the meantime terrorists arrived on the road from the north as well as from the south All those who tried to escape in vehicles on the road were shot to death. Those who survived were those who fled on foot into the fields, and I found them. All of them are traumatized."
The parents of the trapped, who did not know their souls for long hours, echoed the Golan's rescue mission on the web. "An angel in a uniform. No quotes, no quotes and no stories." "There are no words to thank him for the amazing thing he did." In a short time, Golan became the man of the hour, a kind of national hero for the moment. He doesn't take it lightly. "I get phone calls, so I'll say no? It's an area I know intimately, I don't navigate there with a map, and where I recognized that it was okay to enter - there is a certain risk involved, but not hysterical - I entered and made my modest contribution."
What does it mean to you that, today as a citizen at all, you have to go in and out and rescue yourself?
"You have to understand: we had nothing. The Southern Command Gaza Division, and the entire IDF, entered the incident with zero warning, when all the defense systems collapsed: the intelligence did not give any warning. The field intelligence - who is supposed to see the fence - is silent for the first few minutes. The barrier, which is supposed to protect against such events, has completely collapsed. Where Hamas wanted to break through, they broke through. So say: reserve forces were supposed to respond. But there are no reserve forces, because for reasons of the Israel Defense Forces, over the years they have greatly reduced the amount of tanks. Hamas simply entered unhindered, and what remains as a response is the relatively meager standby forces found in the IDF camps, and the standby units of the settlements. These are the most severe opening conditions there are. And those who think that the military system is able to answer this - no. And certainly not for dozens of individual cases."
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''I just need a weapon and a cartridge. This''. Yair Golan in the field
( Photo: from Instagram )
Who do you think signed this default?
"What has collapsed here first and foremost is the Israeli deterrence. For ten months, the Israeli government has been sabotaging the security of the State of Israel. So to say there is no connection is stupid. We signal weakness, two or three months pass, and Hamas says: Wow, this is an opportunity. Here is the trigger: from an image of a strong country, we moved in their consciousness, within the range of nothing, to a crumbling country. Think what has happened here in the last few months: we brought in the best serving reservists in the world - because what does the life of a reserve pilot in Squadron 69 look like? Every week he flies at least once, on the days of exercises He flies all week, he finishes a year with 70 reserve days! - and we told them: Traitors, we'll manage without you. I myself have been defined as a leftist traitor for many years. And when a country corrupts itself knowingly and takes its senior citizens, the people who sacrificed the most of their lives and risked their lives, and defines them as traitors, as fallen, as 'go to hell' according to the great warrior Shlomo Karai - then Israeli society begins to disintegrate. The image of the disintegration was perfectly absorbed by Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. And they understand that this is the opportunity."
The government, for its part, will blame the protest, the announcements of the reserve pilots for stopping volunteering.
"Wait, who created the protest? The protest is made up of people who got up in the morning and said, 'We're terribly bored, let's go protest'? Those who are dismantling Israeli democracy created this protest, and let them stop fucking their brains."
Tali Gottlieb said: "The IDF and the Shin Bet have joined the terrorists."
"Raan, I will not descend to the level of Tali Gottlieb's arguments, I do not refer to these dark, wretched and corrupt types. They are a bunch of garbage. Don't ask me for references to Tali Gottlieb. But the other thing that cannot be ignored is the creation of a deliberate escalation in the Palestinian arena: Ben Gabir that rises on the Temple Mount, the complete freedom for the settlers to do what they want, the indifference and ignoring of pogroms of Jews in the Arabs - I don't believe that this sentence comes out of my mouth at all - in Hawara, Turmos Aya and Umm Spa - and this creates the drive in Hamas and Islamic Jihad to start carrying out attacks. So Both the image of weakness and the increased motivation for terrorist attacks created the basic conditions. This is the most serious political failure since '73, and the intelligence failure is even worse, because in '73 there was information and the interpretation of the information was wrong. Here there was no information. That is, there is a complete collapse here of the intelligence concept of the IDF and Shin Bet".
The border line is supposed to be hermetically sealed, isn't it?
"The IDF continued with the same concept of '73 - that there would be a warning. And besides the warning, we have a collection system along the fence, sniper positions, and forces that know how to respond, and tanks, and an underground and above-ground obstacle, and above all this we have an iron dome and radars. Apparently a strong defense. But what did Hamas do? An obstacle Underground - not interesting, we'll come above ground. An above-ground obstacle? We know it, we got to it in demonstrations, we blew it up in several places, that is, this obstacle is not that bad. So we have a collection system - but it is known and known: the balloons of the Strip Gaza hangs in the air and you see them, you see the observation towers - there is no secret gathering. They know where we see them, and therefore also where we don't see them. How do you neutralize the observation array? Grenades from the air on the observation plates, we will blind them. And that's exactly what they did. Then the road to the settlements is open, and of course a diversion is also created - firing PTZs and rockets will give the Jews something to mess with."
"Certainly we will recover. We need to stop with this nonsense, with the Israeli tendency to see everything as a holocaust. No. This is a hard blow, we must recover from it. Nations recover if they decide to recover and have proper leadership. We unequivocally do not."
The wisdom of hindsight. How did we not think of all this?
"Because what didn't we learn from Yom Kippur? That the military assumption should be - and I learned this many times at the PoM - that the line of contact will never be breached. And if this is the case, you must have depth and the ability to respond. Many armies throughout history - the French at Mazzino, for example, who set up a magnificent defensive line that the Germans simply bypassed - made exactly the same mistake, and it's amazing how it repeats itself. Because what do you say? I am in my territory, I am organized as I please, I invest billions in it, build a magnificent array, who can control me. And every time it crashes again. and why? Because when you build a formation that is completely exposed to the enemy, he will always find the loophole. Always. So building a line without depth, which is based on the idea that there will be a warning, is simply wrong."
Maybe we should have listened to Yitzchak Barik, who predicted the battle?
"I've known Barik for many years, and I've always told him: you're right, just not for the right reasons, you always take it to the military, but our military is good, it's something completely different: in recent years - especially in the years of the Karamtech stars" L - the investment in the land forces was poor. The level of training is insufficient. And there is nothing to do; Wars are decided on the ground. Check. There is no war decided out of thin air. And we unequivocally directed too many resources to the Air Force and the IDF, and too few resources to the land army. I shouted about this endlessly in my time: the idea that systems are decisive in intelligence efforts is a lost idea. What systems are decisive is the land army. And the land army has not received investment for years The appropriate one. And that's the terrible failure."
The terrible failure crossed Israel with a vengeance: on the one hand, a lost, frightened, dysfunctional country, slow to respond, unfaithful; And on the other hand, the state of all its good citizens, which organizes efficiently and in record time and replaces, almost completely, the functions of the government and the state in times of emergency and chaos. And here Golan found himself as a fighting front, sometimes a one-man army. His cell phone doesn't stop ringing, and Golan drives the tiny Yaris between the fighting areas in the south and the Home Front Command and tries to save him.
He is energetic, energetic, it seems that the state of emergency stirs the blood in his veins, and that he is completely in his element. Golan is still, above all, a soldier, and of the type on whom Israeli mythologies were born: crystal clear, expressive, eloquent, goal-oriented and fearless in a way that may sometimes be exaggerated. He is very far from the despair and grief that attacked Tel Aviv and the center this week. An hour with Golan, and you come out of it like new, almost optimistic; Not only is our hope not lost, but we will still build from it, and even better, even if he himself does not know or want to say what the essential order of operational operations is at the moment, except "this campaign must end with Hamas not having a military arm. It has no military capability. No This can only be achieved in a large-scale ground operation, and it is a long campaign of several weeks."
Is such a scheme possible when they have so many of our prisoners?
"The senior political and military echelon will have to decide. But once Hamas took its Pearl Harbor, there is no more 'let's get to some series'. You have to decide what you want to achieve, and from that cut back. And in my view, the purpose is four things: the elimination of the military power of Hamas and other organizations Terrorism in Gaza, creating a situation that does not allow for their military rehabilitation, the rehabilitation of the surrounding area and the entire south as a national effort, including high-level security - because otherwise no one will come to live there anymore - and deterring Iran and Hezbollah."
But what about immediately?
"First of all, to close all the shelters to Gaza. I think that in this campaign a humanitarian effort should not be allowed. We should tell them: listen, until they are not released, from our side you will starve to death. This is completely legitimate."
You hear people saying "Erase Gaza".
"I'm not sure they understand what that means. There are 2.1 million people in Gaza. To kill them all? In my eyes, it's an unprofessional sentence by unprofessional people. It has a tone of revenge, which I can understand its emotional root, but war is not done with revenge. And revenge is served cold - from the head, not from the heart."
Will Israel ever recover from this event? How far is the watershed?
"You look at the history of nations, and there is no question at all. Of course we will recover. Did the French recover from the German occupation in World War II? Yes, and they are not a bad nation. So I don't understand this question. We need to stop with this nonsense, with the Israeli tendency to see In every way a Holocaust. No. It's a hard blow, we must recover from it. Nations recover if they decide to recover and have proper leadership."
And we have?
"No. We have unequivocally inappropriate leadership. It is impossible to look at the ministers of this government, most of whom have never served in the IDF, or served in insignificant positions, and say: This is the ideal cabinet to manage the campaign. And it is impossible to look at the group of Christians who have dominant representation in the government and say: they will outline the dominant direction of the State of Israel. impossible".
In the middle of the week, on the verge of declaring a national emergency government, Golan still hoped that Benny Gantz would not "give kosher to an unworthy leader and an unworthy coalition", because the partnership of fate, as well as the action, exists according to him anyway. "One might think that we are not partners. Why, who is fighting? I saw that all the 'treacherous leftists' showed up. They all went down and fought, were killed en masse. So don't let them screw our brains, we are inside. No one can tell me: you stayed on the fence. We didn't stay. We wore uniforms, we risked our lives, we went to fight. But you will pay for this failure."
Sounds like you're on your way back to politics.
"Sure. Such an event, who will take responsibility? Who will restore the State of Israel, Tali Gottlieb? Benjamin Netanyahu? I will tell you who will restore the State of Israel: the honest-hearted people, the people who dedicated their lives and will continue to dedicate - they and their children and grandchildren will be restored."
In that case, are there any statements of yours that you regret? "Civil rebellion"? "Subhuman"? "Parasites"? Sometimes the style and the choice of words upset people about you.
"It drives me crazy that the people in my camp talk to me about style. Don't you understand that the people on the other side are constantly delegitimizing us? Instead of talking about the essence, they talk about the style. When we speak nicely and politely, they trample us. When we speak more bluntly, they criticize us About the style. Stop with this nonsense and go fight for the house."
What do you think about your "process speech" today? Have the processes progressed since then?
"What are you saying?", Golan laughs, not wanting to elaborate. "In every society there are class and economic tensions, in ours also sectarian ones. What is good leadership? One that makes sure that the forces that bind are stronger than the forces that disintegrate. This government has brought the forces that disintegrate to be stronger than the forces that bind, and that is its greatest sin. And the other original sin is the control over millions Palestinians".
Some will say that the disengagement from Gaza was the original sin.
"Not true. We need to understand where we are headed: annexation or separation. I think the original idea of dividing the land is essential. The disengagement from Gaza was a welcome thing. The mistake was that we left the security responsibility in the hands of Hamas. We had to create a disengagement in such a way that on the one hand we would stop hanging around among them, But we will also isolate them from the Egyptian border, we will not allow IDF entry, we will cross the Strip in a corridor or two. And we could do it."
And then continue to two countries?
"You have to understand that the problem is the occupation of millions of people - and it's not an occupation of territory but of the people, because in the Golan Heights we sit in the territory and it doesn't bother anyone - alongside the absolute madness that we - we! - will unite all the Palestinians in the territories of Mandatory Israel into one entity. After all, the success of the Zionist enterprise stems from the fact that we knew how to unite and they never knew how. So now we are going to take all the Arabs of Mandatory Israel and unite them? This is short-sightedness of the first order. Therefore, extreme messianic nationalism is the most serious existential danger to the State of Israel. It is disintegrating us from the inside. And the coup d'état was not born in a vacuum, but united three such forces: strengthening ultra-orthodox autonomy, strengthening governmental corruption, and annexation. These are the three sins that led to such a severe rift in Israeli society, and it is strictly forbidden to give concessions to those who initiated and did it."
And there will be no discounts? Five years from today Netanyahu is not in power?
"Yes. Unequivocally. Just as Golda and the formation did not survive Yom Kippur. The dust will settle and it will happen. In '73 the Israeli government made a grave mistake, but there is no doubt that there were serious people who sacrificed for the interests of all the citizens of Israel. Here you have an unworthy government Obviously, therefore no discounts should be made to her."
And when all this is over, he says, he will get off his uniform and go back to work on "establishing a suitable political framework for the future Israeli story: focusing on a person - not a god, not a leader - and looking ahead, to progress. The right-wing opposes progress, but progress makes us who we are, a functioning nation ".
Do you feel that this event changed something in the public's attitude towards you? In the networks there were those who apologized to you publicly.
"I was never depressed by people saying 'traitor' and 'radical leftist' and I'm also not too enthusiastic about people saying 'I was wrong.' I fight politically for the only thing that can save the State of Israel: a courageous connection to heritage, history, To the folklore that makes us a people, and on the other hand, devotion to the person - a country that will be the best for its citizens, all its citizens - and how we become world leaders in ever-expanding fields."
What are you doing with it in the next few days?
"I will continue to move around the sector, and I will do it the best I know how. As long as it takes."
